I enjoyed Shakespeare in school, but I had teachers who were enthusiastic about it and *why* the story behind the plot was so important. R&J, Macbeth, King Lear, and so on - I thoroughly enjoyed them, even when I didn't completely understand everything going on.
However, there were plenty of other things i hated SO MUCH. Old man and the sea. IT's an OLD GUY. He is DYING. HE IS NOT THE MESSIAH he's just a dying old man! Scarlet Letter. 50 pages to say I FOUND A BOX. AAAAAARG. I hated them so much that I refused to read them again in college :P Some things are symbols. Some are not. I also hated gatsby, but I suspect it was just because everyone is thoroughly unlikeable to me.
I had one teacher that perpetually gave me Cs because I'd present the book as I saw it. It wasn't until I started blowing up my papers with what I considered "Flowers and bullshit" that I started getting decent grades from him. To this day, I get angry when I think about it. Other teachers I had? They loved the perspective (or at least said they did) of "Seriously? Messiah complex maybe, but really? He's a dying old man."

I read this great post on John Green's Tumblr, titled Famous Novelists on Symbolism in Their Work and Whether It Was Intentional: "Reading is not a game of Clue; books are not a mystery that you have to solve by putting all the pieces together. That’s not the point. Find the meaning you want to...